Stephen Miller said in a CNN interview this week that the President has “plenary authority” over military deployments.
This comes as a surprise to no one.
Mainly because the small number of people who knew what “plenary authority” means already knew this crowd were aiming for a fascist dictatorship and everyone else just went ‘huh” and kept scrolling TikTok.
I don’t use TikTok, but I had to look it up to make sure I was remembering correctly. Check it out for yourself on Wikipedia.
It’s not a phrase that comes up very often, and there’s a good reason for that,
Because there are no plenary powers in the United States constitution.
There are a few things that look like plenary powers.
Only Congress can declare war, for example, but the President controls the armed forces and can choose how to manage such a declaration.
Only the President can issue pardons, but the Judiciary decides what that means and how any individual pardon should be interpreted.
This lack of any real plenary powers is, in fact, the actual idea behind the much-ballyhooed “checks and balances” concept.
So, no; there are no plenary powers in United States law. At all.
And this is important.
Any functioning Democrats in Congress and particularly in the Senate, as well as any non-fascist Republicans there, should really be a bit more upset about this than they are about whether the federal health insurance subsidies expire before or after the 2026 congressional elections.
They should be rearranging their funding demands around this newly-explicit claim that the President has any unconstrained authorities at all.
The federal government cannot be trusted with any funding at all while anyone claiming this power has any role in the administration.
The President does not have “plenary authority” over anything.
Because this is America, boy, and we don’t do that nonsense here.
